Question about transferring steam games between computers

[Dweedle]

Im going to be buying a gaming pc in the next few weeks and Im hoping I can avoid re-downloading my steam libary to it.

 

If I install steam on the new pc and then copy and paste the game folders in steamapps to the steamapps folder on the new pc will they work? Or will I have to re-download the games? (My poor usage meter will cry lol)

 

Thanks.

Edited April 8, 2013 by Dweedle

[JimboUK]

Yeah that'll work, Steam may want to reinstall Direct X and stuff again but you won't need to re-download the games.

[Dweedle]

sweet, I guess i'll have to verify cache on em too, but it wont be as bad as redownloading them all.

[Zewp]

Recently simply copying the game files doesn't always seem to work, because Steam apparently now stores install files which if not detected by Steam, makes it redownload the entire game even if the files are present in SteamApps. The easiest way around it is to keep your current SteamApps folder separate, install the game you want on Steam and the moment it starts downloading you pause the download, cut and past the relevant SteamApps folder into the new Steam install and then it should detect all the files properly.

[Illiad86]

You can also use the Steam backup feature:

 

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8794-yphv-2033

 

Used it for TF2 and a few other games. Works good :smile: Burn em to a CD/DVD, put em on a external HDD, whatever you want.

Edited April 15, 2013 by Illiad86

[Zewp]

The backup feature is a bit clumsy, though. I find it almost freezes my PC when I'm backing something up, which is very odd as I've got a pretty decent PC.

[Illiad86]

Really? Never had that problem when I backed anything up. But, I haven't used it in over a year now.

[Zewp]

Yeah, I have no idea why it does that, but when I back something up I can barely watch a video or movie in VLC media player, and that's on a PC with 8gb RAM. No idea why it uses so much resources, but I avoid the backup feature because of it.

[xaliqen]

This is the official Steam support article about moving your library and games. I've done it at least five times now.

 

Just keep in mind you'll want to back up/sync games with the Steam cloud service for games that use it. For games that don't use Steam cloud, you may have to go digging in your documents folders if you also want to transfer your game saves, etc...

Edited April 20, 2013 by xaliqen